About our Approach
We really care about our work, our community, and each other. And we believe our mission and values show in everything we do. We respect our clients and help them achieve their highest potential.
Our Philosophy: How We Do Business
We are a team of professionals who share the belief that the core of every successful organization is the point at which motivated people meet clear mission.
We work in partnership with our clients, relying on our shared commitment and values to explore where they are, where they want to go, and how they can determine success. Our work is always customized to suit the client’s specific situation, needs, and desired outcomes.
Decisions Decisions focuses on long-term sustained success. We take a systemic perspective in all our work to ensure that our clients are addressing the true root causes of organizational problems, opportunities, and challenges.
We provide services only in areas where we are especially qualified. Through our strong network of seasoned professional colleagues, we can refer you to others if our expertise doesn’t match your particular needs.
How We Do Facilitation
Facilitation is an art, not a science. Good facilitation allows people to communicate, collaborate, and commit in ways that they otherwise could not.
Our staff have decades of experience facilitating high-profile groups addressing highly-charged issues. We have taught, written about, and most importantly practiced the art of facilitation. While every assignment is unique, we have found that a few principles have helped us work with diverse groups addressing challenging problems:
* Be scrupulously neutral
* Focus on process and allow the group to focus on content
* Encourage everyone to talk openly, listen actively, and search for common ground
* Respect cultural differences in the group
* Know yourself; don’t try to conform to anyone else’s idea of what a facilitator should be like
* Be comfortable with conflict, volatility, ambiguity, and awkward silence
* Be flexible in responding to emerging challenges and opportunities
* Check your ego at the door
How We Do Training
Our training emphasizes practical skills that can be used on the job. We use highly participative formats, interspersing brief lectures with large and small group discussion, experiential activities, case studies, and lots of practice. We employ organization-specific examples and activities and timely, constructive feedback – always customized to meet client goals.
Our training services include needs assessments, curriculum design, workshop presentations, and development of learning teams/cohorts, resource referrals, training evaluations, and coaching/support. We accomplish this by following some simple guidelines:
* Being fully present
* Cooperating and communicating
* Communicating the Essentials Nonverbally
* Consensus Decision-Making
* Interactive Facilitation
* Authentic Engagement
* Facilitator Intervention Techniques
* Building Skills
We offer participants the opportunity to learn new behaviors, analyze situations, solve problems and modify attitudes in ways that will increase both their job satisfaction and success.
How We Do Authentic Engagement
It’s easy to talk about public engagement while doing little to actually engage the public. People become jaded quickly when they sniff out public involvement as a mandate and not a commitment. By giving voice to the community, authentic engagement draws from the wisdom and creative energy of diverse perspectives and builds ownership and support.
We start by going to people where they are, rather than expecting them to come to us. We listen – truly listen – and then we play our findings back to be sure we heard right, so that good ideas can be tested, challenged, and strengthened.
Our efforts are guided by a few clear principles:
* Be clear about the goals of engagement
* Work intentionally and creatively to overcome common barriers to participation: unmet basic needs, language and cultural differences, age, social isolation, and distrust or skepticism
* Utilize existing grassroots networks to meet people where they already are
* Align engagement activities with the decision-making process
* Plan to adapt
* Communicate regularly with participants through the end of the project
* Evaluate engagement and share lessons learned
How We Do Consultation
We don’t do cookie-cutters. Because every client and every assignment is different, we design every engagement to achieve specific outcomes in the context of unique needs, constraints, opportunities, and dynamics.
Because our clients are just as capable and professional as we are, we expect to work together as full partners, relying on one another’s strengths and capabilities. They are the experts in their disciplines, and ultimately the source of creative solutions. We are proud of the catalytic skills we add to the mix.
We are open about how we work, senstivie to timelines and budgets, and committed to keeping people connected. We assign to each project a team uniquely suited to its requirements, drawing from our own staff and, when appropriate, adding trusted colleagues.
Four principles underlie our approach to consultation:
* Our work is active, interactive and collaborative
* Our approach is efficient and transparent
* We help people work together more effectively, in a spirit of discovery
* Be flexible